Now, there are many reasons to look into management consulting as a job or even a longer-term career. Even just in terms of the skills, you yourself had a reason for wandering into this Coursera specialization. What I'd like for you to do as you go through all this different content. It's kind of being in college. In the middle of a course, you're like, "Why in the world did I even sign up for this class?" Same thing here. Always ask yourself, "What am I learning? What am I trying to get out of this?" Because there's three big buckets the way that I see it, so here on the photo, you can see the head, and the heart, and the hand. What am I learning? Why am I learning it? How do I actually put it into use? Think deeply about your motivation and a lot of this will resonate very much with the green caps because you are in learning mode and you're in the position where you want to get that great job. All of this applies to you. For the blue ladders in corporate America, same thing. You might not be getting a job at a consulting firm, but you've seen consultants come in on Monday morning off the plane, talk to some executives, do some research, talk to you, interview you, and then 5, 6 weeks later, have a presentation that the executives love and frankly, some of those good ideas even came from you. Why not have some of that magic yourself? Then finally, in terms of the red airplanes in the solo same thing. Some of this might feel like getting a consulting job, but I'd like for you to really think about why do consulting firms recruit this way? Why do consulting firms look for these people? Because there's a common thread between what consulting firms are trying to hire and what you're offering to the client. Let's jump in. I was talking to a several colleagues of mine who are in consulting firms, managing directors, and we just brainstorm these different things. Reasons why you might choose management consulting and frankly, what you're trying to get out of this class. I organize it as much as possible into the head, the heart, and the hand and frankly, this isn't everything. You might have your own reasons. When I'm thinking about entrepreneurs, maybe reason number 11 might be autonomy. You don't want to have to go to work 9-5, you want to hang up your own shingle with your name on it and work with clients doing what you do best, that's autonomy. That's not on the list that applies to the red airplane folks. Consulting, you can make it what you want, but let's go through a couple of these. First, just intellectually, why is consulting a smart move? Many many reasons why consulting is a smart move. If you graduate from university or MBA or a master's program in analytics and you get hired by a great consulting firm, no one is going to say that you made a bad choice. No one. In here some of the reasons, getting a consulting full-time offer, which you will find is that you get a lot of experience. It's a great business foundation because honestly, you're just learning continuously. The way I see it as you're getting paid to learn, the clients, actually paying you and the consulting firm to learn and become more valuable. You'll work across multiple industries, diverse functions, small teams, big teams, and the roles that you're on those teams can be different. It could be that on one project you're the analyst who's collecting the data, scrubbing the data, cleaning the data, making the data sing. That could be your role. Another time you are the project lead. Your job isn't to do the analysis somebody else is doing that. Instead, it's your job to interact with a client and also make sure that the team is well functioning. Later on in your career, you might find that you are the partner who's actually selling the work. You're not even doing the work so much as you're interacting with a client trying to figure out, once this work is finished, what should we do next? You're truly an advisor. With that in mind, you get a lot of exposure, a lot of experiences and projects are very different and there's some beauty in that. A lot of us don't want to do the same work every day, why? Boring, so this is a chance for you to really stay curious and have fun. Here I'd say you're going to work hard. No consulting firm for that matter, no client is going to hire you and pay you a lot of money to relax, so consulting by and large is not a 35-hour-a-week job at all and as a function of that, you're going to learn really quickly. This is like going to university and finishing in two and a half years. Usually takes four years in the United States, two and a half years. You're going to be learning at one and a half speed, like listening to a podcast, and for a couple of reasons, one, just the volume of work. It's like you are going to work hard, trust me. Number 2, you're going to work smart. A lot of consulting is working smart and lazy and that means using best practices, using what's worked before. These big consulting firms, they've done this project before. You're going to look at the old deliverables and see what you can use again. Finally, and I think this is the best, coolest part of it is this is not theoretical. Clients aren't going to hire you and pay you a lot of money to take a look at some abstract thing that might not matter. They're going to pay you to solve their hardest problems. The clients are essentially like every time they pull out their wallet and they pay you, they're voting with their dollars on what's the most useful work. In conclusion, here look at the quote at the top. Vince Lombardi, very famous football coach here in the United States and he's old school guy, where he said, "There is no substitute for work." Do the work. At the very bottom you'll see you're going to do more work very productively and you're going to have a lot of practices. If you think of yourself like a baseball batter, you're going to have a chance to see a lot of pitches and you're going to be swinging the bat multiple times. That's one of the reasons why this is such a career accelerator for many of us. One of the reasons it's nice to go to a good university is in addition to what you learn, it's the people you hang out with and the connections and the relationships that you get. One beautiful thing about consulting firms is after you leave, and frankly, a lot of people leave consulting. It's pretty rare for somebody to enter consulting when they're 20 and then 30 years later they're still in that same consulting firm. It's pretty rare. People joined consulting firms and then they leave and what you find is that your LinkedIn network is really broad across industry, different work and different roles. One of the beautiful things about that is in addition to it being a great job when you leave and if you leave, you have a very strong network. There are people who you can send them a message on LinkedIn and say, hey, it's John, we were in the same office 15 years ago. Do you have 15 minutes, can I give you a call? By and large, not too different from university alumni, they will say yes. Here at the bottom, you'll see a sample of some of the job titles of people that I worked with. I was a newbie consultant, I was agreeing cap and so were they. Then fast-forward 10 years and you see senior VPs, general managers, VPs, directors of private equity, a lot of really success oriented people join these firms and it's a gift for you. This network is a beautiful thing. I said it and I apologize if it seems repetitive. Consulting is rigorous and some people would even say grueling job. There are some consultants that fly out Monday morning, fly back Thursday night, every week. That does exist and I live that life. That is also why a lot of consultants have Marriott and Hilton and Delta and they have a lot of frequent flyer miles because they're travel warriors. Two thoughts; even though you work hard, since it's project-based work, the project starts and the project ends. Because of that reason, if you're smart, one, your personal time off, your vacation time is honored. If you have a wedding, if you have something that you want to get done, something's happening in October, as long as you're very transparent and communicate, you can have 4-6 weeks off. You can make that happen if necessary. The other thing is consulting firms, their asset is people. Yes, they have some proprietary database and some proprietary methodology and ways to work and relationships, got it. But the majority of what they have and the majority of the reason that they're successful are their people. Part of your goal as a green cap is to get in there, do great work, build relationships, and become irreplaceable. You want to become the person that people call. On the right-hand side of the screen let's say that you're leaving. You leave the firm, it was very good experience. You were there for four-and-a-half years, but let's say for whatever reason lifestyle you don't want to travel as much, for whatever reason you're leaving the consulting firm. First thing is there's no shame in that. Most people leave the firm. A lot of times firms actually help you to get your next job. Why is that? Well, one, it's classy thing to do and then two, a lot of times the alumni of that consulting firm later on hire their old company to do work for them. You will also get excellent exit opportunities, they call it exit opportunities. But basically, after you leave this firm, there is a very good chance that recruiters and corporate recruiters actually reach out to you and offer you a job. What I'll say is, you do the hard work, you put in there time, maybe several years and after that, you are actually rewarded because your next spot is actually quite good. Let's talk about money. Consultants aren't poor. Consultants make pretty good coin. Here in the title, you can see that 14 percent of Harvard's undergraduate class went into consulting. There are a lot of reasons for that. It's not just the money, but it's also the network like I had mentioned, also the ability to learn new stuff. It gives you a lot of optionality. You're not handcuffed into one job. It creates options for you. I didn't list the exact salary amount because that varies from year to year, it also varies by firm to firm. But it's not hard to find. I mean, it's readily available. A couple of research tips, go to a top 25 Business School, and look at their placement statistics for their MBA and undergraduate majors. Universities are not shy. They want to brag to you, about how much their graduates actually make in salary and in bonus. They typically also break it out by different industries. Under industries of consulting, you will see undergraduates make x and MBAs makes y. That'll give you a sense of how much money you can actually make. Also, I have a couple of blog posts where I actually found this information online and posted it at consultantsmind.com. In conclusion, don't need to belabor the point. Consultants make pretty good money. In conclusion, consulting, I have a huge passion for it. I hope you can hear that in my voice and also in the slides here. I think it's a great opportunity for you to really learn a lot, to have a lot of optionality, to meet smart people, to work on tough projects. If you're curious and you'd like to learn, it's a great choice for you. It's also a career accelerant. It helps you accelerate your career. Yes, you could be on the steady path, but it's also for a few of us, a way for you to jump a couple of steps. Nobody likes to go step-by-step if they don't have to. It's a chance for you to accelerate your growth and really do the hard work. It's not free lunch. I said that you're going to put in a lot of rigorous time. But if you've been watching this specialization this far, you're not trying to make shortcuts and jump ahead. You're okay doing the hard work, and if you want to do that, this could be a great choice for you. Compensation, quite good. I'll go ahead and jump to the bottom of this section. I think this is, tells you a little bit more around the career path of consultants in generalist firms. They call it the Big 4 consulting firms. EY, Deloitte, KPMG, PWC, or the big 3, McKinsey, Bain, BCG. They follow generally a generalist consulting model. What does that mean? It means that a lot of times when you join, even though you're 21 years old, they're going to teach you basic consulting skills. You don't specialize. You don't specialize in oil and gas or telecommunications. You don't specialize in marketing and cryptocurrency and operations, you're just a generalist. Think of it almost like, if you wanted to become a chef, the first thing you're going to learn in the kitchen is how to chop vegetables and peel potatoes. When you first join a consulting firm, honestly, that's what you're being tasked to do, peel a bunch of potatoes and chop carrots because one, you need to know how to do it, number 2, you're going to get better at it. One is early in your career, have a little bit of patience, because you need to put in your time and you need to get good at very boring stuff. Number 2 is consulting as hard work. No surprise. If they're going to pay you a lot of money and there's a lot of good reasons to do it, it's not for free. But I don't think any of you are really afraid of hard work. Then the last one, and I think this is really important. I realized that many of you watching this aren't necessarily based in Atlanta, Georgia. If you're based in Europe or Africa or Asia, your situation could be totally different. In order to be smart about it, what I would do, is I would do some informational interviews. What's that? We'll talk about it later in the specialization about how to do it well, and there's a couple of no-nos that you don't want to do. But basically you want to reach out to somebody who's doing the job that you're thinking about, and buy them coffee. Spend 15 minutes and find out what's your day like. Do you regret doing this job or do you wish you had started sooner? This is my situation. Do you think that consulting could be a good fit? Basically be a human, be a little bit vulnerable, ask smart questions and listen.
